Google

Google is currently one of the largest Internet-based companies in existence (if not THE biggest), hosting dozens of different services.

Google probably isn't evil per se, but they do want you to put all of your data on their servers. Trusting any one company that much is probably a bad idea. If your entire life is on Google, what happens to Google happens to you. For a remote idea of what can happen, look at Yahoo!.

Archive Team has decided to take a census of Google services, to see what has and hasn't been saved. See the Froogle project.

Contents

Backup Tools

DataLiberation is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. Here you can find instructions to backup from every Google service.

Blogger

Gmail

Gmail Backup allows you to backup your emails in EML format and optionally upload them again into a separate Gmail account.

Gmail provides IMAP access, so you can use OfflineIMAP to backup and sync your complete archive in standard UNIX maildir format, usable by Mutt, Thunderbird and most sane e-mail clients. See this blog post for more details.

POP access is a very simple way to continuously download all your emails in Gmail to your favorite email client. This method doesn't preserve the label/folder structure, though - but does include your emails that are sent from Gmail.

You may also want to consider setting up forwarding of all your emails in Gmail to an Outlook account or some other email provider (that has enough quota to work as your archive).

Google Notebook

Has been announced to be discontinued. GNotebook (luckily) has an export-to-XML function (a link at the bottom of the screen) that at least Diigo and Evernote are able to import (without coding skills).

Google Gears

Is not a backup tool per se but at least for Google Docs and Gmail GGears downloads all documents/attachments to your computer as readable documents (which can be found in your user profile/Google folder(s)). Google Gears is no longer supported by Google.